Chapter 7
seven
PHOEBE
Colby wakes twice in the night, and the three o’clock alarm is the good one.
Everyone warns you about the nights, but nobody mentions that somewhere in the middle of them you get twenty minutes of a dark house with a warm person in it, no phone, and nothing anybody can ask you for.
I’ve come to like the three o’clock feeding. I’d never say that out loud to another mother. It sounds a little like showing off.
So it was three, and I had him in the chair by the window with the one lamp on, and the ocean gently crashing the way it does at night where you can only barely hear it.
The iPad was on the dresser where it lives, running the white noise app, because my son can’t sleep without the sound of a fake rainstorm and neither can I anymore, I guess.
He pulled away after ten minutes to reorganize his opinions on whether that was enough or not, which he does with a milk-drunk look on his face, and I reached over one-handed and picked the iPad up to turn the rain down.
Strangely enough, there was a document open behind the app.
Not hidden. Not passworded or anything. Just sitting there in the files the way anything sits in the files of a device everybody in this house uses, synced from Troy’s laptop the way everything syncs from his laptop, because we’ve never had a single conversation about privacy in seventeen years and have never needed one.
NEWMAN — DRAFT 11.
I didn’t hesitate for a second. I’ve wanted to read that book since the day he told me he was writing it, and he’s been extremely coy about it, and he has said the words you’re in it about forty times with a specific look on his face. Well, duh.
I sat in the dark with my son on my chest and I opened my husband’s memoir, a funny curiosity coming over me.
After swiping through parts, I found the chapter by accident. It was just where the file happened to be sitting.
The first time I ever saw her play.
And, God, it was beautiful.
He wrote about Indian Wells, which I’d forgotten he was even at. About being twenty-one and bored and dragged there by a producer. About not caring for tennis at all. And then about a player he’d never heard of, down 4-1 in the third, doing something with her feet that made him sit forward.
He noticed the feet. Nobody notices the feet.
He wrote three paragraphs about my footwork. My husband, who can’t reliably identify a let, wrote three paragraphs about how I moved when I was nineteen years old, and every single one of them was right.
He got the split step. He got that I take the ball earlier when I’m frightened.
That’s backwards, and no coach except my father has ever spotted it.
He wrote that I looked like somebody solving a problem rather than somebody fighting, and that he’d never wanted to know anybody more in his life than he wanted to know whoever was doing that.
There’s a line in there about the exact sound of my shoes on the court.
He wrote about coming back the next day on his own, without the producer, and buying a ticket like a normal person.
I was crying by the middle of it. Not sad.
The other feeling—like I was going to melt into a pile of goo because it was too sweet.
I sat there with my hand on Colby’s back and read my husband describe watching me be the best in the world at something, and I thought, oh, you absolute idiot, you should have shown me this months ago.
Then I kept reading.
My eyes went down the page and stopped.
She walked away at the perfectly healthy age of thirty-four with her body still working and her mind still on the ball, and the world called it brave, and I stood beside her at the press conference where she did and hell, I called it brave too.
But it wasn’t brave. It was a mistake.
That’s maybe an unfair assessment, and I’ve never said it to her, and I am saying it here because this is supposed to be the true version of my life.
She gave up the one pursuit on earth she was the best in the world at, and honestly, she’s spent two years being asked how she is finding motherhood by people who have never asked her what she gave up for it.
I would not undo our son for anything in this world.
Both of these things can be true at the same time.
The rain kept going on the iPad in my hand.
I read it again.
I read it a third time and my ears started ringing. That happens to me. It happened at Wimbledon in the second round the year my mother got sick, and it means the same both times: my body has understood something my head hasn’t caught up to yet.
My hands were fine. That’s the strange part. I looked down at them because I expected them to be shaking. They were doing what they always do, which is nothing at all, because they were holding a baby.
Two years.
He’s thought this for two years. He thought it at Christmas. He thought it while I was pregnant. He thought it in the delivery room and in the car on the way home and on the floor of the living room doing the bicycle with our son in that stupid fucking sports commentator voice.
He sat down at a desk, on purpose, at night. He chose that word. Then he went back and revised the paragraph around it and left the word exactly where it was.
It was not brave. It was a mistake.
Colby came off and grumbled. I blinked too fast and put the iPad face down on the arm of the chair, switched him to the other side, and got him latched. He settled.
And I fed my son.
I sat in that chair in the dark for eleven more minutes and fed him. I didn’t cry. I didn’t put him down. I didn’t go and wake my husband up and scream at him. I put my hand flat on my son’s back where I always put it and I felt him breathing and I looked at the wall.
Then I burped him. Then I changed him, which he hated, at length. Then I put him down on his back the way you’re supposed to, and I stood there for a second with my hand lightly on his chest until he settled.
I did all of it the way I always do. Every step of it.
Because he’s four months old and none of this is his, and because a person taught me a very long time ago that you finish from the point you’re in.
I went out to the landing.
Our bedroom door was open and the outline of my husband was in our bed, asleep on his front the way he has slept since I met him, one arm off the edge.
I looked at him for a while. Maybe too long.
I got as far as the doorframe and put my hand on it.
There’s a version of that night where I say his name.
He wakes up the way he always wakes up, disoriented and immediately worried.
I sit on the edge of the bed and say I read what he wrote about me, and the color goes out of him, and we’re both awake and wrecked before dawn, and by breakfast we’ve started fighting.
I had my hand on the frame. I was two feet inside the room.
And I didn’t.
I wasn’t angry yet. Maybe if I’d been all the way angry I’d have walked in there and thrown something and we’d have had it out at three in the morning like normal people do.
What I was, standing on that landing, was embarrassed.
Because I’ve spent two years telling everybody I was fine, and being extremely pleased with myself about it, and my husband has spent two years thinking somebody had to be brave and tell me about my life.
And he was right about my footwork.
That’s the part I can’t get past. He watched me. He’s the only one who watched me like that.
And he still thought I made a mistake.